Most Babies Sleep Through Night at 3 Months

Oct. 25, 2010 -- There's light at the end of the sleep-deprived tunnel for parents of newborns. By age 3 months, and sometimes as early as 2 months, most infants are sleeping through the night, according to a new study, although their sleeping hours may not exactly match those of their parents early on.

"Two months was identified as the most likely age for infants to begin sleeping through the night under both the midnight to 5 a.m. criteria (the one criterion traditionally used to describe sleeping through) and an unspecified eight-hour criteria," says researcher Jacqueline Henderson, PhD, a post-doctoral research fellow of psychology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

By age 5 months, more than half of the 75 infants studied were sleeping the same hours as their parents, the researchers found.

Consolidating Sleep

Typically, infants' sleep becomes more consolidated with age, evolving from short periods of several hours of sleep followed by several hours of wakefulness over the 24-hour day to a more uninterrupted nighttime sleep.

To investigate how the consolidation takes place and when, Henderson and her colleagues tracked 75 typically developing infants for 12 months. Their parents completed sleep diaries for six days each month and those sleep reports were backed up by videos of the infants' sleeping times.

The researchers considered three different criteria for sleeping through the night:

Midnight to 5 a.m.

8 hours of uninterrupted sleep

10 p.m. to 6 a.m., the pattern most in line with family sleep times

When Parents Can Expect Relief

For both the midnight to 5 a.m. and the eight-hour criteria, two months was the most likely age for infants to do this, Henderson says.

''Three months was the most likely age for infants to begin sleeping through from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m, a criterion that better reflects typical family sleep requirements," she says.

"By 5 months of age, 73% were sleeping from midnight to 5 a.m., 62% were sleeping for an eight-hour period, and 53% of infants were sleeping from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.," she says.